Hello everyone,
Thandy, for those who haven't heard about it by now, in few words is a package system for Tor packages and the like. One of the biggest problems we have right now is keeping users' Tor up to date, so we are trying to make time to get this going.
(For more detailed information about Thandy check [1], specially the doc/ and specs/ directories)
A couple of months ago, nickm and erinn worked in writing the package format spec (see [2] for more details), and now I'm going to start working as fast as I can (which may be slow) in implementing this last spec and get a working Thandy.
On the more technical side, the idea is to implement this in Python as a first approach. In terms of distribution, Python isn't the best choice for platforms like Windows, but right now porting Thandy to another language isn't among the top priorities.
This will probably be merged with the alpha track of releases we are making, so this can have as much testing as it can before going to stable.
[1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/thandy.git/tree [2] https://gitweb.torproject.org/erinn/thandy.git/blob/934300a7c4c6c0493bedaf05...
Cheers,
On Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:40:07 +0000 Tomas Touceda chiiph@gentoo.org wrote:
A couple of months ago, nickm and erinn worked in writing the package format spec (see [2] for more details), and now I'm going to start working as fast as I can (which may be slow) in implementing this last spec and get a working Thandy.
Hello Tomas,
Can you update us on thandy progress so far? I've seen some work in the alpha version of vidalia. Where do you need help?
On 5/1/12 9:52 AM, Andrew Lewman wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:40:07 +0000 Tomas Touceda chiiph@gentoo.org wrote:
A couple of months ago, nickm and erinn worked in writing the package format spec (see [2] for more details), and now I'm going to start working as fast as I can (which may be slow) in implementing this last spec and get a working Thandy.
Hello Tomas,
Can you update us on thandy progress so far? I've seen some work in the alpha version of vidalia. Where do you need help?
Hi,
There hasn't been any Thandy specific work for a while now. When I "finished" the integration, it ended with everything a user should need to have a Tor+Vidalia+Thandy setup (I realize now that I should've sent this email a while ago). The code I wrote is in an early development stage, it may be really good, but I won't know until somebody else properly reviews it and we deploy and see what the users complain about.
As of today, the status is the following: Thandy itself has a working implementation for the THP package specification Nick and Erinn wrote. There is a new GUI application to display Thandy's output in a nice way and act as a bootstrap to update Thandy[1]. We have a Vidalia plugin that periodically checks for updates and updates the bootstrapper if needed. I've tested the Thandy client with PyInstaller to generate a bundled Python application, and it seems to work as expected.
What we need to do now is to setup a Thandy repository, create the packages for what we want to distribute (and maintain them) and distribute the whole set of things to the user. From that point, we will likely want to reduce the size of the bundle the user has to download... but that's a problem for a future stage.
tldr; everything is there, it works and it probably has bugs, we need to deploy and see.
To help with deployment, I wrote [2] and [3] but there hasn't been any actual integration for that in any makefiles or anything.
As I said somewhere to at least one person, I'm not a good candidate to do the deployment and maintaining the packaging itself, so I need help with that mainly and probably fixing the problems that may arise after deployment.
[1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/chiiph/thandy-bootstrap.git [2] https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/chiiph/thandy.git/blob/devmtg:/samples/ex... [3] https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/chiiph/thandy.git/blob/devmtg:/lib/thandy...
On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 3:33 AM, Tomás Touceda chiiph@torproject.org wrote:
tldr; everything is there, it works and it probably has bugs, we need to deploy and see.
How about sending a list to tor-dev with information about how to test, and where to file bugs? I'm sure a number of people on this list would be more than happy to help out, myself included.
On 5/3/12 11:40 AM, Runa A. Sandvik wrote:
On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 3:33 AM, Tomás Touceda chiiph@torproject.org wrote:
tldr; everything is there, it works and it probably has bugs, we need to deploy and see.
How about sending a list to tor-dev with information about how to test, and where to file bugs? I'm sure a number of people on this list would be more than happy to help out, myself included.
May be, but testing is the hardest part, we aren't in the "please download this for testing and report bugs here" part yet. The person that would do the testing needs to setup the whole repository and create different sets of packages. The idea with doing a testing deployment was to work out these parts and leave the "test the software that the user will see" to early adopters.
A list right now will be something along the lines of: - Clone Thandy, read the docs, setup a repository. - Create packages, bundles and thp data packages, then create updates for those in the form of: update the whole bundle, update just one package within the bundle. Also create a package that would act as the bootstrap package to test the case "update the bootstrap app", create a package that would act as Thandy itself, another for Vidalia for similar purposes. - Clone thandy-bootstrapper, build it. - Create a binary for the Thandy client with PyInstaller. - Use the latest Vidalia alpha with the thandy plugin from vidalia-plugins.git repo. - Simulate updating each of the packages/bundles you've created and see where it breaks. - Report bugs to trac.torproject.org under the Thandy component.
If we create a repo with actual functional packages and a tbb with the thandy plugin and bootstrapper, and we keep the packages up to date with the tor/torbrowser/vidalia releases, we can just tell the users "download this (having in mind that it's for testing and things might break) and just use it, it should update by itself, if something breaks, report to trac".
-
Andrew Lewman -
Runa A. Sandvik -
Tomas Touceda -
Tomás Touceda